A Qualified Person Runs The SMS

A Qualified Person Runs The SMS

Another great post from CatalinaNJB

When an airport operator or an air operator appoints a qualified person as the Accountable Executive, the options are wide open to appoint anyone in the organization who they see qualified to be responsible for operations or activities authorized under the certificate and to be accountable on behalf of the operator for meeting the requirements of the regulations. The requirement to qualify as the AE is a person who has demonstrated control of the financial and human resources that are necessary for the activities and operations authorized under the certificate. This is a broad description of qualifications, but becomes limited to organizational structure of authority.   

The AE is a psition without performance requirements    

The appointment of an airport AE compared to an air operator AE is slightly different, since an airport certificate is issued to a land-surveyed area, while an air operator certificate is issued to an individual or a corporate body. An AE for an airport is responsible to the land-surveyed area, while the AE for an air operator is responsible to the board of directors. However, as operators both AEs are responsible on behalf of the certificate holder for meeting the requirements of the regulations, which one of them are the Safety Management System regulations. 

An Accountable Executive requirement could also be a matter of identifying a person who leads the necessary cultural change of Just Culture and Quality Assurance Culture and how services are provided with safety assurance to the general public. Without an SMS there is no safety assurance.

 Aviation Safety Management System is the NextGen of aviation safety, where a cultural change is inevitable for an SMS leader to be successful. Culture change does not happen overnight, but over a lengthy period of time. For a Just Culture to develop, each individual in an organization must be acceptable to these changes. The Just Culture and Quality Assurance Cutlers are developed within an organization by personnel consuming data, applied learning to data for processing into information, engage their information in operational processes with an output of knowledge and by assessing this output and comprehend the systems involved in a change of culture. This change is culture is the Return on Investment (ROI).

SMS is a businesslike approach to safety, where ROI is vital to success. When a certificate holder is applying this businesslike approach to safety and appoints a qualified person as the Accountable Executive, the requirement of demonstrating control over human and financial resources is incidental to the ROI. When applying this concept the NextGen of Accountable Executive Leaders in Aviation SMS are born.

CatalinaNJB